Mad Max: Fury Road’s High-Octane Sets and Locations

Director George Miller brought his legendary character Max Rockatansky back to the big screen in 2015, 36 years after the release of Mad Max, the first film in the franchise. The latest movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, which has garnered ten Academy Award nominations, finds Max (Tom Hardy) on the run with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who has taken a War Rig off course in order to save the Wives (Courtney Eaton, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, and Abbey Lee) from the tyrannical warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). To create the postapocalyptic Wasteland, Miller turned to production designer Colin Gibson, who has won a BAFTA (and is up for an Oscar) for his work on the film.

The movie was in development for years before filming began. “I first got offered entrée to the room full of storyboards in 2000,” says Gibson. “There was no script, but there were thousands of storyboards and a very well-mapped-out action backbone. But we had to put the anthropological flesh on the bones and start to give each of the characters and each of the groups a firm footing in our new futuristic wasteland.” As the film is set 45 years after the collapse of civilization, Gibson looked at ancient fortresses and sanctuaries, such as Petra, Jordan. The research, he says, “was more of a historical search on my part to look at what civilizations did in extremes.”

1 / 3

Photo: Jasin Boland/Warner Brothers

In director George Miller’s latest film, Mad Max: Fury Road, 45 years have passed since the fall of civilization, and the world has become a chaotic wasteland where water and gasoline are rare and precious commodities. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) sets out to save five women held captive as wives of the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), taking them and fleeing across the barren landscape to a promised land she remembers from childhood called the Green Place. Along the way she encounters Mad Max (Tom Hardy), who is also fleeing the Citadel, a fortress controlled by Immortan Joe. Together they try to outrun Joe’s armada and find safety for the Wives. Production designer Colin Gibson was tasked with creating the postapocalyptic world, from vehicles built from salvage to the cavernous Citadel. Gibson began working on the film in 2000, before there was even a script. Fury Road is the fourth film in the Mad Max franchise, and, according to Gibson, it was important to chart new territory. “George did not want not to repeat himself,” Gibson says. “That was his greatest fear—that imagery he’d done 30 years prior had been devalued and clichéd and had been beaten around the head a little bit too much, so he was desperate to avoid the same thing. Basically, he wanted it to have a really strong underpinning of logic and truth. So instead of looking at the previous films, we really envisioned the story as a fall back towards fascism and feudalism as civilization fell apart.”

Since much of the film takes place on the journey from the Citadel, a massive fortress ruled by Immortan Joe, to the Green Place, an oasis that Furiosa remembers from childhood, finding the right landscape was crucial. “We were hoping to do it all in Australia, but very little of the desert is actually absolutely bare, which was George’s original brief,” says Gibson. “The story line required deep rocky canyons, as well as huge, open, epic emptiness to remind us all how puny we are and what a pathetic handhold we have on the Earth.” After a worldwide search, Gibson and Miller decided on the deserts of Namibia for production.

According to Gibson, filming in Namibia wasn’t as easy as just going out in the desert with cameras. The production team had to prepare the locations to accommodate filming with a large crew and to make it safe for complex stunts and chase sequences. “We had 18-wheel trucks that needed to be doing 85 miles an hour for all the stunts to happen,” he says. “We had to put in hidden roads and carve access ways into the sand dunes so that we could actually get 600 people and 150 vehicles in.” The crew also had to protect the existing landscape. “We ended up fabricating more than 300 or 400 faux, hollow rocks and boulders that we used to cover the plant life and the trees. Also, of course, we couldn’t crash our trucks into the real environment. The vehicles themselves only came into contact with our fake versions of the canyons and stone.”

The Citadel was filmed in Namibia, Sydney, and Capetown and combined sets, locations, and visual effects. “We filmed the base twice. We built it in Namibia in a dry river canyon, but schedule-wise we didn’t manage to shoot that and had to strip it out. It wasn’t until almost eight months later that we rebuilt it in an empty reservoir in Sydney and shot there by building a fake wall and putting in fake waterfalls and pools.” The cavernous interiors were fabricated from fake stone. “To tie us to the area where we had filmed the exterior, I took high-resolution images of the natural canyons, and we pulled molds and colored them to match the actual rock and stone that was there.”

Advertisement

Gibson’s team used the salvaged parts of 350 cars to custom build the film’s detailed vehicles. “We call them characters,” he says. “They had names. There were 88 distinct characters, but we built about 150 because we needed doubles and sometimes triples of things that had to do specific stunts, like when they’re hurtling through the air while on fire. You generally needed a couple of goes at that.”

The materials used in the production could all be traced back to their pre-apocalypse origins. “We asked ourselves, ‘If the Armageddon starts next Wednesday, what’s going to survive?’” says Gibson. “It had to be strong and repurposed for war. That means that anything that you couldn’t fix with a stick or a pair of panty hose probably wasn’t going to make it. All the computerized vehicles, all the carbon fiber, and the present contemporary stuff just wasn’t gonna cut it in terms of battle.” Gibson also emphasizes beauty as well as durability. “If you’re going to bother to save something, to drag it back across the desert and to rebuild it, then it has to have an inner beauty. We kept looking for things that had a poetry or a beauty in them. Man doesn’t suddenly give up his need for that sort of nourishment just because it’s the end of the world.”

Our website, archdigest.com, offers constant original coverage of the interior design and architecture worlds, new shops and products, travel destinations, art and cultural events, celebrity style, and high-end real estate as well as access to print features and images from the AD archives.